Last summer, Ricardo rented a living room set from the Rent-a-Center at Southgate. When he got a couple of weeks behind on the payments, the store tried to tack on hundreds of dollars in late fees, he says. He wouldn’t cough up the extra cash, claiming Rent-a-Center owed him money for damage done to his house during delivery.
In response, the store sent over Mark Gurko, a young guy with a van, to collect the furniture. He arrived at the Tankers’ Maple Heights bungalow around 9:30 one morning and rapped on the door. Ricardo’s car was in the driveway, but no one answered. Gurko rapped again. Then he dialed 911 on his cell phone and made up a story: Ricardo Tanker had threatened to shoot him if he didn’t get off his property.
The Maple Heights Police rushed over. “The calls we get from rental places are usually a disturbance we don’t get involved in,” says Chief Richard Maracz. “But they decided to make sure nothing was wrong.”
Warrantless, the officers burst through the Tankers’ back door, their guns unholstered. They found the family upstairs, looking suspiciously like they had just been roused from a deep sleep. Ricardo, who was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, jumped up in a panic, his arms raised in surrender.
“Oh no, oh no, don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, I don’t have a gun,” he yelled, according to the police report. And guess what — he didn’t have a gun, but the patrolmen marched him outside anyway, slammed him flat on his back in the driveway in front of his eight-year-old son and the neighbors, and called the K-9 unit for backup.
Gurko said he wouldn’t press charges if Ricardo would give the furniture back. Ricardo, fearing arrest, agreed. “I’m not a fighter,” he says from his now-bare front room. “I’m not gonna argue with nobody. I give a person anything I got if I have it.”
After he’d loaded up the furniture as police stood by, Gurko drove away, probably thinking he had seen the last of Ricardo groveling there on the pavement. Ricardo, however, had other plans: He had to restore his good name.
On a subsequent Saturday, Ricardo went back to the Southgate store, thinking he might run into Gurko. Armed with only a tape recorder and moral conviction, Ricardo was brimming with well-thought-out questions.
“Hey, what’s up there, Mark, how you doing?” Ricardo said, taking out the recorder and holding it in plain sight.
“Pretty good,” answered a flabbergasted Gurko. “How about yourself?”
“OK, my man. Look here, I need to ask you a question. Now you know for a fact that all this stuff is behind us. You know for a fact, I never threatened you. Am I right or wrong?”
“Right.”
“You know I never threatened you a day in my life . . . I did not threaten you, am I right or wrong?”
“I gotta admit it. You didn’t do that.”
Without police backup or fanciful stories, Ricardo had nailed down a confession. He made several calls, sought the advice of friends, and finally found a former ACLU attorney named William Saks to represent him. Together, they decided about $30,000 in damages would cover the hurt and humiliation the Tanker family suffered at the hands of big lugs. They sent Rent-a-Center a certified letter explaining their complaint and demanding a response by May 6, but didn’t hear back, so they plan to sue.
Besides being embarrassed in his underwear, Ricardo felt a more physical pain: He threw out his back when he was shoved to the concrete, according to Cleveland Clinic emergency room records. His son, Cochino, who is mentally disabled, saw the whole thing happen.
“He was shimmering,” Ricardo says of his son, actually meaning shivering. “He was really feared.” Cochino’s so scared of cops now, he refused to go shopping for Christmas presents with them last year as part of the Cops for Kids program.
This is Saks’s second case involving a rent-to-own company falsely accusing a customer of a felony. By law, police aren’t allowed to get involved in private repossessions. If a company can’t peaceably pick up its property, it has to let a judge sort things out.
“Basically, what you have here is a form of loan-sharking,” says Saks. “A loan shark doesn’t worry about legal process — he just uses physical power. Here, the physical power comes from the police.”
Rent-a-Center officials, reached at their regional and national offices, didn’t respond to repeated requests for interviews. Gurko has an unlisted phone number and no longer works for the company, according to Southgate store manager Davette Byers, who declined further comment.
Last year, Rent-a-Center was named one of Fortune‘s fastest-growing U.S. companies. What’s spreading even faster than its stores, however, is its sleazy reputation. Buy a TV on its rent-to-own plan, and you often end up paying about triple the department store prices, a study by the New York state Department of Consumer Affairs found. Rent-a-Center recently paid a $16 million settlement to 20,000 Wisconsin customers for hiding its interest rates.
The company also recently settled a lawsuit for giving job applicants a true-or-false “personality test” with questions that included “I believe there is a God” and “I am strongly attracted to members of my own sex.”
Women who managed to get hired made up only two percent of the company’s workforce. Their boss, now-retired CEO Ernest Talley, was fond of saying “A woman’s place is in the home — chained to a stove” and “Get rid of women any way you can.” That kind of behavior cost the company a $47 million settlement in a sex-discrimination case last month.
The cops aren’t named in the Tankers’ lawsuit, but that doesn’t mean the family feels its local law enforcement acted nobly. The Tankers bought their house in Maple Heights for better schools, but now they’re soured on the city and plan to move.
Actually, they may have to move. They’re way behind on their house payments. They may not be saints with trust funds, but they’re still citizens who deserve better.
This article appears in May 16-22, 2002.
Quite a comical read coming from the “young guy in a van” and its rather funny how this article is written solely from the perspective from the Tankers with no feedback from me / the young guy in a van, Rent A Center, the police, or my attorney. In fact, the majority of this article is filled with completely inaccurate information, such as: The Tankers were not a few weeks behind. They were about 6 months behind, and moved 3 times to evade Rent A Center. I would show up at the door with them on the couch watching the TV they were not paying on as agreed, and he would either completely ignore me or would turn around, laugh and yell or display an obscenity at me. Second, they were not aroused out of bed, Mr. Tanker verbally threatened me showing a handgun out of an upstairs window. The police did find an unloaded weapon underneath a mattress in their bedroom. Also, they did not buy the home they lived in, it was their 3rd rental in a year and we had to use skip trace tactics to locate him because he kept changing locations with furniture he agreed to pay but did not, basically theft, oh and of course Mr. Sheridan does not mention his lengthy criminal history. He was not thrown to the ground in his underwear, he was handcuffed towards the back of a police car wearing sweat pants and a tank top. My manager came to the home and Mr. Tanker begged us not to press charges and told us to just take the stuff which was incredibly damaged and stained. We did not press charges. When Mr. Tanker approached me outside of the Rent A Center store, he was all dressed in black and grabbed me by the arm and forced me in between two buildings to talk. I was extremely afraid of this encounter and would say anything he asked my to avoid getting hurt, I literally feared for my life and subsequently got a restraining order against him for harassing me at my employment which he tried again on three separate occasions – funny how there is no mention of that either. He did sue both Rent A Center and me personally for $25,000. The case was completely thrown out and the Tankers did not get a single dime, and the transcripts from him trying to coerce me into saying I lied – ha, his own attorney did not even want to use it because it was so clearly obvious that he was coercing me, was filled with profanity and he actually recorded a threat he made on me “you really don’t want to make me come back here now do you”? Again, no mention of any of that. I quit Rent A Center of this and am not stating I am an advocate for Rent A Center, but what I am saying is how dare you Mr. Sheridan, write a one sided, completely inaccurate story. When this story first came out in 2002, I sent emails, letters, and left voice mails to tell my side of the story and Mr. Sheridan did not respond to one single request for my side.